rnp@cs.edinburgh.ac.uk (Rob Proctor) (12/11/90)
I've been asked to post this on comp.org.eff.talk on behalf of the research student named below. If you would like to take part, reply to me or directly to the email address below. Thanks in advance for your cooperation. --- Forwarded message: Subject: Hacking From: P.A.Taylor <EJPA09@uk.ac.edinburgh.emas-a> Date: 02 Nov 90 15:25:32 gmt I'm in the second year of a PhD on the subject of hacking/viruses and the politics behind them, and I was wondering whether any of you are prepared to enter into a dialogue on the subject. At the moment, I'm preparing the theory section and literature review. In January or thereabouts I want to start field-work (or modem-work, if it turns out that way) with both hackers and their computer security industry counterparts, and anyone who would consider themselves neither one nor the other, but nevertheless interested in the field and the issues raised by it. Theoretically, so far I've concentrated on the notion put forward in various quarters that hackers are surfers on a technological wave that is carrying the rest of us away, or in a similar vein, cowboys staking out new territory in the new frontier world of computer technology. Looking at hackers in this way has made me concentrate on the whole issue of technological determinism and the "information revolution" and also the idea of hackers being perhaps an extension or most recent development of an alternative culture, hippies with modems perhaps. It also raises the whole issue of the exact nature of cyberspace and the implications it holds... are we entering a new realm of informational colonialism? What is information? Who has rights over it, and are hackers/the computer underground fighting a battle of principle the importance of which has passed most people by? On a more practical level I'm interested in the following points... 1. To what extent has the advent of hacking/viruses fed back into and affected the development of computer science? (e.g. the conceptualisation of genetic algorithims) 2. Information and reference material relating to the formation of the computer security industry. Ideally I'd like to write a short history of it and trace the ways in which it has developed and been shaped by its adversarial relationship with the computer industry. 3. The subject of the changing nature of information illustrated by such episodes as the "look and feel lawsuits" and an increasingly proprietal attitude towards information that is now evident. To what extent are hackers/computer underground concerned with the type of opposition to information control that people such as Richard Stallman and his Gnu project represent? Thanks for taking the time to read all this,and hopefully some of you can give me feedback/suggestions/reference material. Cheers, P.A.T. --- End of forwarded message Keywords:
wayner@cello.cs.cornell.edu (Peter Wayner) (12/12/90)
>1. To what extent has the advent of hacking/viruses fed back into >and affected the development of computer science? (e.g. the conceptualisation >of genetic algorithims) Well, I've never seen anyone say in an article on distributed computing "As Morris states in his seminal work on viruses...", but they really are cut from the same bolt of cloth. After the Morris affair hit Cornell, some professors began debating whether writing a virus was "thesis" grade material. Some felt it was "just hacking." Regardless of this, I discussed doing a thesis on "compiler-generated distributed systems" which, to the department, a perfectly "acceptable" thing. Before the virus hit, another student was doing Certified research on distributed computers and he would routinely clog up the network late at night. He was about as responsible about it as he could be and still push the outside of the performance envelope. Still, it was a pain to find your program paging over the network when he was experimenting. Now Robert Morris's first sin was not asking permission (either of the Department or of the users who's passwords he cracked). His second was causing enough widespread damage to make the evening news. Other than that, it was just "distributed systems research." I would think that his worm has taught a positive lesson to the community. (Although, it could be argued, that it was well-known before.) Namely that large systems behave quite differently than small ones and although he might have tested it successfully on a small network, it crashed when it ran around the country. This is a very visible example of what many computer scientists were arguing was the main problem with the Star Wars computer system. It could never be tested on a large scale (without a war) and so we wouldn't really know if it would work when we needed it. Peter Wayner Department of Computer Science Cornell Univ. Ithaca, NY 14850 EMail:wayner@cs.cornell.edu Office: 607-255-9202 or 255-1008 Home: 116 Oak Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850 Phone: 607-277-6678